Conversations on Captivate, Presenter and eLearning

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This week’s eSeminar was chock full of solutions as we discussed ‘how to’ start developing eLearning based on the kind of face to face classroom content educators already have prepared for the courses they teach. The session examines the growing phenomena of online courses and online supplemental eLearning modules for courses that remain face to face or are becoming blended online and offline instruction.

I’ve embedded the slides for the presentation above. You can enlarge / download etc. using the tools from Acrobat.com. One of the things I didn’t get much time to discuss is Acrobat.com and the incredible resource it represents for educators. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, I strongly encourage you to explore it. Just go to http://www.acrobat.com/ to find an amazing set of online office applications that allow a level of pain free collaboration that far exceeds the options most people are using today.

Captivate 5 for University Educators

This one hour session hosted by Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist, will focus on making the transition to asynchronous and synchronous online education & distance learning for university faculty and instructional design support personnel. The session will examine the specific needs of higher education with regard to online education and will demonstrate solutions using Adobe Captivate 5 and Adobe eLearning Suite 2.

At the end of the session we begin to discuss the potential of Advanced Actions to help create more experiential kinds of learning interactions. You can learn more about Advanced Actions from last weeks eSeminar, including a sample of creating Soft Skills Simulations. The blog link for Advanced Actions eSeminar is here.

Next week’s eSeminar centers on eLearning Suite workflows. Wondering how you can maximize the most complete and powerful collection of tools available for eLearning? Register now for next week’s session.

Understanding the Adobe eLearning Suite Workflow

11:30AM-12:30 PM US Eastern Time, 8/25/2010

Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist, will present a one hour online e-Seminar for intermediate users of Adobe Captivate and / or Adobe eLearning Suite. The core issue will be expediting eLearning development with the complete toolset provided in Adobe eLearning Suite 2.

My last post mentioned the way to set up an owned server, for getting the Captivate quiz results.This blog highlights the new Results analysis tool, which can be used to view the results stored on your servers.

Adobe Captivate Quiz Results Analyzer is a results analyzer tool which comes with Adobe Captivate 5. This tool enables CP users to analyze the CP course results in a better and an organized manner.

Earlier, in the days of CP4, there were very few options available for storing and analyzing the quiz results from CP courses. The authors had to use some LMS (SumTotal, NetDimensions, Moodle, etc) OR the Email reporting feature of Adobe Captivate.

LMS is though, always a better option, but along with its so many advantages, it comes with a heavy cost also. Some LMS are difficult to setup and require a lot of training.

Email Reporting feature is used by most of the authors, who want the results to be stored and readily available with them anywhere, anytime. This feature allows the authors to get the results of every student in a well-formatted email. But it proved to be very clumsy, when the no. of students went higher. Few disadvantages of Email reporting are as follows:

Results are stored in a poorly formatted way.

Fills the author’s mailbox by lot of emails (= no. of students taking the course).

Extraction and storing of results from so many emails, is a very tedious task.

Author has to store these results from emails to some other data-store to further analyze the data, which again is a difficult and time-consuming job.

Adobe Captivate Quiz Results Analyzer is a free tool, which provides a solution to the difficulties which authors faced in using LMS or Email reporting. Listed below are the top features of this tool. I’ll take you through these features, in detail, in my further blog posts.

Features :

Integration with Acrobat.com account :

View the results even when the course is live.

View and analyze the results without downloading them.

Download the results from Acrobat.com to local drives.

Delete the unused course results from Acrobat.com account.

Integration with any server location, to directly view and analyze the results.

View the results even when the course is live.

View and analyze the results without downloading them.

View and analyze the results.

Add any no. of server locations to view the results.

Viewing the results in the form of tables and charts both.

Exporting the results to commonly used CSV format.

Printing reports directly while analyzing the results.

Note: This tool is just a results analyzer tool and does not provide any reporting (storing the results when student takes a course) functionality. For getting the results stored, Adobe Captivate 5 comes with a new feature – Alternate Reporting, whichallows authors to get the course results directly stored on their Acrobat.com accounts or their own server locations. To learn more about reporting, check this link – Reporting the Quiz Results to a Local Server.

There has been some threads in user forum about the connection error which learners get in Slide Video. I got a chance to closely analyze many of these specific issues and in all the cases it turned out to be server configuration problems.

Some background Info: When you insert video into Captivate as Slide Video, it by default is configured to be progressive download. All you need to do is publish the project and upload the entire publish folder to the server – Some cases just a web server (IIS, Apache etc) and other cases to an LMS. In both these cases, slide video is supposed to work well – you should not be seeing a “connection error” message.

You don’t need to do any more specific changes in your captivate project to get Slide Video working. However some users were continually getting this “connection error”. All these has been due to server (web server or LMS) configuration issues. These things help you correct this:

Make sure your server allows hosting and downloading FLV / F4V files. Here we see some specific setting required for Win 2003 server (though this has nothing to do with Captivate).

You can verify whether your server setting is OK by using any FLV player like this. The URL will be http://<your_server>/<your_publish_folder>/<yourflv>.flv. This way you can test whether the server can serve FLV files at least outside captivate SWF.

You can freely check whether your SCORM package is correctly working with video on scorm.com (here). If this works then it is time you talk to your LMS vendor.

Lastly you need to talk to your LMS / Server vendor regarding video hosting. I have specifically seen situations where the LMS vendor has to change configuration to allow video.

In Adobe Captivate 4, you could send an Adobe Captivate project for a review over email. The reviewers would store their comments in a network share location, export them as XML files, or send them over email to you. You would then import the comments into your project.

In Adobe Captivate 5, the review feature has been enhanced to help you leverage all the benefits that Acrobat.com offers:

Acrobat.com acts as a comment store

Users can reply to comments and comment threads are maintained.

You can continue to modify your project even after sending it for review. Adding/deleting slides, modifying slide durations etc will not affect the comments shown on Timeline. (In Cp 4, it was recommended that you do not modify the project after sending it for review).

Offline-commenting. In Cp 4, reviewers used to lose unsaved comments if comments are on network share and network connectivity is lost.

Here are the instructions to set up your project for review using Acrobat.com:

Open the project that you want to share for review.

Select File > Collaborate > Send For Shared Review.

In the Send for Shared Review dialog box, type a name for the review file (CREV file) and then select Automatically Download and Track Comments From Acrobat.com.

Click Next.

Provide your Adobe ID and password. If you do not have an Adobe ID, create it using the link provided at the top of the dialog box.

Click Sign In. A draft of the e-mail notifications to be sent to the reviewers appears.

Customize the body of the draft if you want to provide additional instructions to reviewers.

Enter e-mail addresses of reviewers in the To and Cc fields, and click Send.

All the reviewers receive an email notification with the URL to access your project. They download the project onto their local machines and open it using Adobe Captivate Reviewer. The reviewers then just sign-in to Acrobat.com with their Adobe ID and use Adobe Captivate Reviewer to add comments to the project.

The following demonstration shows how you can set up Adobe Captivate project reviews using Acrobat.com.

Stay tuned for separate entries on Offline commenting and Captivate review on MAC.

We had a great time at this week’s eSeminar, where the focus was on creating custom learning interactions using Adobe Captivate 5’s new Advanced Actions tools. This one is fairly advanced as Captivate authoring goes, but if you’ve had a little exposure to Captivate now I’d encourage you to have a look. The tools provided manage to be both very simple to use, and very powerful options to extend the functions normally available.

The OnDemand recording of the eSeminar is available here;Advanced Interaction Development for Adobe Captivate 5 for Advanced Users

This one hour session will focus on Advanced Learning Interaction Design, Pedagogical and Development issues for eLearning. It will be hosted by Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist and is intended for Advanced users of Adobe Captivate, eLearning Professionals, Academics, and Training Professionals.

During the session i presented a number of samples. I used a Captivate project for the slides rather than a PowerPoint, so i’m providing links to all of the resources here, and i’m embedding the Cp Soft skills project that we finished up with so you can see how it is used.

One of the most requested features in Adobe Captivate was the ability to store the course results on the local servers or database. Adobe Captivate 5 comes with an all new reporting workflow, being highlighted as Alternate Reporting, which enables its users to store and track their course results using their own servers and database.

Alternate Reporting allows the users to integrate their content with their own webservers. Let us see how…in a very few steps…

Step I: Set-up the Web server

For integrating the course with a web server, first the user needs to setup a web server. Here, I will take an example of integrating the Captivate course with WAMP server (PHP-enabled server).

Since some of the users want the results to be stored on their local servers and some want to be stored on some database, Adobe Captivate 5 provides a template script file – InternalServerReporting.php, which is available at the following location – [InstallDirectory]/Adobe Captivate 5/Templates/Publish/. Users can use this script file and modify it accordingly to solve their purpose. Also, there is no restriction on the scripting language used for the reporting script. Users can use any scripting language like PHP or ASP.

Once the script file is ready, you just need to place this file in the root folder of the web server. To check whether the script is correct and accessible or not, please try accessing it using the web browser.

For eg : If the server is on local machine, you can try the following link in your web browser : http://localhost/InternalServerReporting.php.

No error should be displayed in the browser.

Step III: Set the Quiz Reporting Preferences in Adobe Captivate 5

After the server is up and running, and the script file is in place, you need to set the preferences in Adobe Captivate 5, so that the results get reported to the web server.

Adobe Captivate 5 comes with two new reporting options available in the Reporting preferences of Quiz.

For tracking the results using the web server, you need to select and configure Internal Server as the reporting option.

Step IV: Configure the Internal Server

Now, user needs to configure the internal server to his own web server. For this, you should provide the link to the script file in the Server text area of the Alternate Reporting dialog. Also, you should provide the names of the Institute, Department and Course name in the respective fields. All these fields are mandatory and are used to store the course results in a formal structure.

And now, your course is integrated with your web server.

Whenever a student will take this course he will see a Post Results button on the result slide. Once the student uses this button to post the results, the results get posted on your web server.

How can you store the results on a database?

You can anytime modify your script file to connect to a database. Now whenever the results are passed to this script, the code in the script would directly store the results onto the database.

Hence, you can see how easy it is to store the course results on your own web servers/database using Alternate Reporting feature of Adobe Captivate 5.

I’ll give some more highlights on the code in the script in my further blog posts. So keep tuned.

As long as it’s Saturday, I wanted to pause for a moment to explore / share a couple of interesting posts from this week’s social media landscape that I think signal some interesting shifts in awareness of our unusual situation as educators. I have long contended (I’ve been teaching for nearly 20 years now, and have held largely unchanged beliefs regarding the impact of the information age on education for the bulk of that period) that the shift in communication and knowledge delivery from an emphasis on textual literacy to an emphasis on wholistic media literacy and a democratized bidirectional communication paradigm, would fundamentally alter our entire educational paradigm.

There are few places where the impact of the Internet, Hypermedia, Telecommunications and Social Media are more apparent than on the ever escalating debates around the ‘efficacy’ of teaching / learning when knowledge is acquired online.

This week we heard Bill Gates weigh in on the relevance of eLearning with a broadly painted vision of the future. According to an article in Tech Crunch, Bill said that in only 5 years the most effective education will be online. (Apply a thick grain of salt here – for a host of reasons including lack of expertise as both a futurist and an educator, and then add a considerable respect for what has become an impressive and visionary ability to predict realities in computing.)

The core of his message was really that Higher Education needs to get on the ball about recognizing the validity of self-motivated, self-directed research. The point is well taken. In a world where expert testimony from the most impressive minds on the planet is just a YouTube Ted lecture away, is that Freshman 101 course taught by a frantic young grad student really the better use of time? Of course evaluation of knowledge acquired, and the implications for productive use of that knowledge becomes an enormous barrier to the recognition of such non-traditional accomplishments.

Dr. Richard Clark gave the Keynote address at Moodle Moot last week in Austin, Texas. The session was focused on the ‘myth of success’ surrounding Constructivism according to an article on Moodle News. Dr. Clark appears to have recapped Richard Mayer’s fundamental overview of Multimedia eLearning Principles, and pointed to these fundamental delivery solutions as solidly evidence of effective instruction. If you haven’t seen / familiarized yourself with these principles they are quite useful in Multimedia eLearning design, and are solidly grounded in studies from psychology and educational psychology – collecting a set of design principles that when tested (given very limited study parameters) demonstrate improved learning among the test subjects.

NOTE: The video above is not Dr. Clark’s keynote. It is however somewhat helpful in understanding the impetus behind his research and gives you a glimpse at the ideas he and his colleagues are germinating.

Clark appears to have taken the standard Mayer et. al Multimedia principles a step further and applied some of the more time tested principles of Instructional design – eg. rote and repetition, interaction through frequent repetition and response etc. to further emphasize the tenets of direct instruction – and polarize these methods apart from an approach commonly regarded as constructivism or discovery learning (another theoretical base for education which generally manifests in learning activities that are more centered on learner ‘realization’.)

Clark’s approach is interesting in that it has the potential to polarize viewpoints, but also because there are some very solid facts supporting the efficacy of the methods he lists, for maximizing the impact of knowledge based instruction. That said, in a world now focused on 21st century learning outcomes – seeking people well prepared to create, adapt, synthesize and evaluate information critically – that sort of polarization, if misused, could be quite toxic for young educators. An exclusive dependence on these proven methodologies will prove disappointing if we are trying to build skills in the upper echelon of Bloom’s taxonomy, but abandoning these very valuable direct instruction methods in favor of purely Constructivist solutions that lack the predictability of outcome would be equally problematic.

I draw my understanding of the lack of universality of the conventional approaches from my own educational experiences in learning to do things like paint, draw, negotiate contracts, design complex technical solutions etc. It is likely the same kind of argument that most educators use for their ‘blind acceptance’ of Constructivism – and the flaw that Clark rightly points out in the evidence behind the efficacy of the theoretical model.

Interestingly, if we look critically at Constructivist teaching strategies we will quickly realize that even within the conventions of Instructional Design described by Clark, the Constructivist model is playing a natural role. Commonly accepted Constructivist teaching strategies include things like; actively involved learners, an interactive – student centered environment, and the assignment of both accountability and responsibility to the student. These fundamental tenets are at play in many varieties of conventional / direct instruction – so long as it strays to some extent from the sage on the stage model.

Notably, Mr. Gates call for recognition of the educational accomplishments of independent students swimming in a wellspring of information from credible experts, smacks firmly of this sort of Constructivist tradition. I suspect that as with most such situations, great thinkers are tickling the edges of new paradigms that may well help us all to thrive in this new post literate, age of information. The challenge we all face is to adopt the willingness of Clark and Gates to break down our assumptions about existing paradigms for learning, and in so doing – both honor the relevance of our traditions and embrace the reality of our future.

Just after this initial post i discovered George Siemens recent conversation on YouTube.

His core topic is Socializing Open Learning – and in this fascinatingly parallel discussion he points to the relevance of communication connections (above the network) and notes that a ‘course’ may well not be the best delivery mechanism for information in a system which is overflowing with content (information) and / or one which is not stable (in which the body of information is subject to constant redefinition, modification etc.)

This week in the eSeminar series we compared and contrasted Adobe Captivate 4 to Adobe Captivate 5 in order to assist users making the transition. The slides used in the seminar are included below, and you can review the eSeminar via Adobe OnDemand using this link.

You can full screen the embedded pdf above to see the slides larger if you like. The complete description of the OnDemand eSeminar is below.

Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist, will focus on the differences and similarities between Adobe Captivate 4 and Adobe Captivate 5 during this one hour session intended for people with experience using prior versions of Adobe Captivate.

Advanced Interaction Development for Adobe Captivate 5 for Advanced Users
8/11/2010
11:30AM-12:30 PM US Eastern Time

This one hour session will focus on Advanced Learning Interaction Design, Pedagogical and Development issues for eLearning. It will be hosted by Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist and is intended for Advanced users of Adobe Captivate, eLearning Professionals, Academics, and Training Professionals.

Now, you can help in building a better Captivate by just using it. This is a new channel for customers to provide feedback to the captivate team. All you have to do is, Go to Help -> Adobe Product Improvement Program and choose “Yes, Participate”.

The Adobe Product Improvement Program will yield valuable information about how customers use and interact with Captivate. The program is voluntary and anonymous.

Customers who choose to participate agree to share:

System information, such as operating system, processor, locale, browser information and memory installed

Captivate features usage information.

No personal information is collected and the collected information follows the terms described in the Adobe privacy policy.

Basically, when you agree to participate,

Information about how you’re using the product, for example, how you use certain features and functions like Object Style Manager, Slide Video are sent to Adobe, but no personal information is collected — it is 100% anonymous.

Participating will not affect user experience or performance of Captivate and will be virtually invisible to you. When you close Captivate, the collected information is sent to Adobe (no 3rd party is involved)

Adobe Product Improvement Program Dialog

By default, you are not participated in the improvement program.

If you haven’t given a preference, the Adobe Product Improvement Program Dialog pops up in the fifth launch of Captivate. You can either give a preference or ignore it.

The information collected will be used to better understand how customers use Captivate and helps in building a better Captivate for the customers moving forward as the years pass by.

Today I’m adding the details of several upcoming eSeminars planned for September to the already extensive list of eSeminars for August. If you missed the first of this series, on migrating legacy PowerPoint slide decks, do not despair. I’ve already shifted it to the Adobe OnDemand space and you can watch it here.

During the seminars, I’ll be sharing thoughts on Adobe Captivate 5 for various audiences and interests over the next several weeks. I hope you’ll join me as we take deeper dives, explore various features, and even do very basic overviews all aimed at answering the needs of the diverse users of Adobe Captivate (and maybe some future users too.) If you want to see one, just click the bitly link and sign up with your Adobe ID. They are always fun and its a good chance to meet members of the community – get those pesky questions asked, and learn about some new things that may interest you. (Times are all US Eastern.) Hope to see you there.

This one hour session hosted by Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist, is intended for Trainers, eLearning Professionals and members of the Academic community who want to learn how to migrate their legacy slide decks to more engaging interactive online content.

Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist, will focus on the differences and similarities between Adobe Captivate 4 and Adobe Captivate 5 during this one hour session intended for people with experience using prior versions of Adobe Captivate.

Advanced Interaction Development for Adobe Captivate 5 for Advanced Users
8/11/2010
11:30AM-12:30 PM US Eastern Time

This one hour session will focus on Advanced Learning Interaction Design, Pedagogical and Development issues for eLearning. It will be hosted by Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist and is intended for Advanced users of Adobe Captivate, eLearning Professionals, Academics, and Training Professionals.

Captivate 5 for University Educators
8/18/2010
11:30AM-12:30 PM US Eastern Time

This one hour session hosted by Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist, will focus on making the transition to asynchronous and synchronous online education & distance learning for university faculty and instructional design support personnel. The session will examine the specific needs of higher education with regard to online education and will demonstrate solutions using Adobe Captivate 5 and Adobe eLearning Suite 2.

Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist, will present a one hour online e-Seminar for intermediate users of Adobe Captivate and / or Adobe eLearning Suite. The core issue will be expediting eLearning development with the complete toolset provided in Adobe eLearning Suite 2.

This one hour session for Advanced Adobe Captivate users will be centered on the development of complex navigation, interaction & general application behavior by using the tools provided in Adobe Flash Professional CS5 (as part of Adobe eLearning Suite 2) and Adobe Captivate 5. The session will be hosted by Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist.

Is Rapid eLearning Right for me- A Beginners Guide to Elearning
9/15/2010
11:30AM-12:30 PM US Eastern Time

This one hour session hosted by Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist, will focus on the decision to use Rapid eLearning for your institution. While cost savings are clear, there is still a lot of discussion about the eventual efficacyof Rapid eLearning in spite of strong numbers supporting its use. Partridge will discuss the importance of solid Multimedia eLearning and Instructional Design principles in the development of Rapid eLearning in order to maximize efficacy and minimizethe likelihood of ineffective course creation.

Captivate 5 for University Students
9/22/2010
11:30AM-12:30 PM US Eastern Time

Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist, will focus on the rapid adoption of Adobe Captivate among University students and examine the key motivators for students adopting Adobe Captivate. Studies indicate a rise in adoption of rapid eLearning tools over traditional slide creation tools among university students. What is motivating this trend?

This one hour session intended for Advanced users of Adobe Captivate will be hosted by Dr. Allen Partridge, Adobe eLearning Evangelist. The eSeminar will focus on challenges and opportunities involving video and audio in online eLearning, specifically regarding the use of audio and video with Adobe Captivate 5. The new full project workflows for sound and video will be examined in detail.

I hope you’ll be able to join me for all of these great sessions. We’ll continue the march of eSeminars with a whole new set in coming months, and we look forward to these great opportunities to share and interact with you the members of the community.

I’d like to see us make August Captivate 5 Mastery Month. I’ve been inspired by wonderful recent articles created and posted to the Adobe Community Help by members of the Community like this recent contribution from Lilybiri.

With hundreds of thousands of Captivate users and virtually all of them predisposed to developing eLearning, I’d want to challenge you, yes you, to create a tip, a tutorial, a handy use case or other tidbit to share with the broader Captivate Community. The architecture to share these wonderful community generated resources is already in place in the Adobe Community Help Publishing system, which starts with a very cool Community Publishing Air application that will give you a helping hand as you create your learning resource.

All you need to do is download the application (use the big blue Community Publishing Air App Download Now button) and then start writing. You may even be recognized by peers for outstanding community help contributions and together we have an opportunity to provide an unparalleled resource for new Captivate course authors as they begin to learn about using Adobe Captivate. When you finish your contribution I hope you’ll let us know, by commenting on this post with a short summary of your posting and a link.

What do you think? How many articles do you think we can add? Let’s make August of 2010 a month to remember in building both the online resources for Captivate and the community itself. Everyone has something to contribute, what will you add?